The Boreal Owl Murder (26 page)

We walked for another ten minutes in quiet. Great Horned Owls continued to hoot, and once more, I thought I heard the Boreal, but again it didn’t complete the call. Luce thought she saw movement in the trees off to our left and raised her night vision binos to her eyes. She didn’t move for a full two minutes, so I lifted my binos, too. I didn’t see anything nearby, so I adjusted the focal distance out.

“I’ll be damned,” I breathed.

“Yup,” Luce breathed back.

“Money in the bank,” Stan said, his binos up, too.

We were looking at a cherry-picker.

Standing on the hillside across a ravine, the picker looked like part of an oversized preying mantis, partially draped in camouflage cloth. Covered in snow from last weekend, the machine would have disappeared into the forest because no one would have been able to distinguish it from the landscape around it. It tilted at an odd angle.

“It’s stuck,” Luce said. “I bet it was on its way to the Boreal site to do some harvesting and got stuck in the snow back in December. That must be one of the old logging trails it’s sitting on.”

“Which Thompson knew about because he used to log up here,” Stan added.

“And if it was sitting there when Rahr made his first trip up here earlier this month, he would have been convinced he needed to do something to protect the habitat.” I thought again of Eddie’s comments. “Eddie said Rahr told him he was going to do some preventative maintenance. I guess he was referring to the tree spikes.”

We crossed down and through the ravine, then slogged back up the hill to take a closer look at the stranded cherry-picker. Definitely sitting at a tilt and definitely stuck, it was splattered with freshly churned earth along its sides. I put my hand on the hood over the engine.

Still warm.

This was what we’d heard less than an hour ago. Someone had been here, trying to move the truck.

Behind me, I felt, rather than heard, Stan melt away into the night.

“Luce,” I whispered. I reached out for her hand and pulled her next to me. “Do you have your cell phone with you?”

“Yes,” she whispered back. “Why are we whispering?”

“Because. Humor me. Give it to me, please.”

She pulled it out of her jeans pocket and handed it to me. I looked around us, but I didn’t see anything moving. Stan was gone. I glanced into the cab of the cherry picker to make sure no one was hiding on the floor of the cab. Nobody there.

I pulled out my flashlight and aimed it at the seat. A parka, heavy gloves, and a wool cap were laying on the bench. Clothing you’d wear in the woods on a frigid day. Clothing that would keep you from freezing.

Clothing that Rahr’s body hadn’t been covered in.

I punched in Knott’s phone number.

“Knott here.”

I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “John,” I whispered, my voice barely audible.

“Really, I’m not here,” the recorded message ran. “I’m unable to take your call, but if you leave a message at the sound of the tone, I’ll get back to you.”

This is why I hate answering machines.

“Allow me,” Margaret Montgomery said, stepping out of the darkness from behind the machine. She reached up to take the phone from my fingers. At the same time, she raised her other hand. In it, she held a gun.

This was not what I wanted to see.

For a second, I had that same feeling I had when the deer materialized in front of my car that night and I swerved to miss it: like I had been instantaneously transported into another universe where things just randomly appeared out of nowhere and completely altered your experience.

Except that the deer hadn’t been holding a gun.

Nor had it looked like my mother.

Stupid, stupid, stupid
, I told myself. If I hadn’t been so intent on finding the owl, I would’ve realized that the gears we’d heard earlier was not a good sign—that someone else was in the vicinity. Someone who might not be totally thrilled to see us traipsing down the trail. But somehow I’d convinced myself we were safe: the grinding had stopped, the forest was silent and there were three of us. Safety in numbers. I gave myself a mental kick in the head. There were two of us yesterday and somebody still took a shot at me. Obviously, safety in numbers failed to kick in until you got past three.

At least.

“Step away from the truck,” Montgomery said, waving the gun slightly to my right, indicating to Luce and me where she wanted us to move. “Further.”

Obediently, we moved together, practically joined at our hips. As we shuffled, I felt Eddie’s recorder that I had dropped back in my pocket dig against my leg. I carefully slipped my hand in and hit the record button. Someday, I reasoned, inquiring minds might want to know.

Like maybe the police when they found our bodies.

Montgomery walked us further away from the vehicle, then she slowly backed up to the cab, holding the gun on us all the while. She took a quick glance into the cab.

“Looking for something?” I asked.

There was enough moonlight filtering through the tree limbs that I could see expressions chasing each other across Montgomery’s face: expressions like frustration, calculation, resolution. Gee, isn’t it great that I can recognize these things? Too bad it didn’t count for squat at the moment.

“Yes,” she replied, her sarcasm thick. “I’m looking for a way out of this mess.”

“And which mess would that be?”

Crap!
I was doing it again, asking counselor questions when what I really wanted was for Montgomery to stop talking, go away, and leave us alone.

“Where should I start?”

A memory flared in my brain. I was in the girl’s bathroom at school one morning, about a year ago. A petite brunette stood at the sink, shaking, holding a razor blade just above her wrist. Calmly, I talked with her, using every trick I’d learned in Crisis Intervention 692 in grad school. I empathized, I gained her trust, I directed her attention, I listened. In the end, she had folded and dropped the razor.

I just had to do the same thing here. Except that this wasn’t about wasn’t a teen with a razor at her wrist. This was a desperate woman with a gun … aimed at me.

I looked Montgomery in the eye. “I’m listening.”

“For starters, I need to get these clothes out of this cherry-picker.”

“Why’s that, Margaret?”

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought her gun hand wavered a little. Even though my eyes were well adjusted to the darkness, there were too many shadows to make my vision completely reliable. I tried to quiet myself even more and focus completely on her so I would know the moment she lapsed, either mentally or physically. And the second that happened, I’d push Luce to the side and make a dive to tackle Montgomery, and we might be able to get out of this situation alive, even if a little worse for wear.

And then it came.

Not the lapse I was waiting for, but something else.

The cry of an owl.

Rising, flute-like notes. A fast series of seven tones.

For crying out loud, I thought. Not now!

Ruthlessly, I shut it out. I needed to concentrate on Montgomery. My life, and Luce’s, were riding on my paying attention. Very, very close attention.

“I have to get the clothes out of here,” she said again, “because we can’t get the cherry-picker out. It’s stuck. I just tried again a little while ago. Damn weather. Either the ground is too soft from the snow, or too hard from the freeze, or too slippery from the thaw. I hate the weather here. You can’t depend on a thing.”

She was right about that, but I didn’t think this was the opportune time to compare meteorological notes. Then again, everyone likes to talk about the weather. Especially in Minnesota.

“Is the weather different in Seattle?” I asked, grasping at the slim hope that she’d been living in the state long enough to want to talk weather. The truth was, I needed a conversational distraction, and this was going to have to be it.

She smiled and nodded. “Vern told me you stopped by today and that you were heading up here. That’s why I came up tonight to try to get the picker moved. He thinks it’s hidden well enough, but I know about you. You find the birds no one else does, and I was afraid you’d find this. I was right. And now I can’t let you tell Knott, about the picker or the clothes.”

Montgomery shifted her weight, still holding the gun steady. “Vern also said he told you that I encouraged him to start his own business.”

“VNT is going well, isn’t it?” I tried for a soothing tone. “Was the poaching your idea, too?”

“Of course not. That’s illegal.”

She sounded offended that I would even think it, but at least she was getting engaged in the conversation. That was good, in my favor. She shifted her weight again. Her arm definitely relaxed a fraction.

“I just mentioned there were a lot of woods up here that nobody even knew about. Trees and flowers no one would ever miss. I was a lobbyist for the timber industry, Bob. I believe we should use our natural resources wisely, but that we should, indeed, use them.”

“I’m familiar with that sentiment.” I hoped that Eddie’s gizmo was picking up every word. “So when the Pacific Northwest logging companies got clocked by the spotted owl …”

Montgomery visibly stiffened. Suddenly, anger radiated off her in almost tangible waves.

Uh-oh
.
Ixnay on the owl-ay,
I told myself. Somehow, I’d hit a nerve. A very big, very raw nerve.

“They didn’t just get clocked, Bob,” she snapped. “They were shredded. They were ground through the mill just like the wood they harvested for paper. Families were ruined when there were suddenly no jobs, no income. Children went hungry. Communities disappeared. No one was prepared.

“But that wasn’t the worst of it,” Montgomery almost spit, she was so angry. “Not for me, at least.”

“What happened?” I asked. I kept my eyes locked on Montgomery’s face. Beside me, I could feel Luce tense, and I carefully placed my hand on her arm, willing her to be still for just a little bit more.

“My brother was killed.” Montgomery’s voice went flat. “He worked for the lumber company. He was a logger. He cut into a tree that was spiked. His chain saw snapped, and the blade flew back into his chest. He was dead when I got to the hospital.”

I heard Luce’s quick inhale next to me, and then silence filled the night. Montgomery was still holding the gun on us, though it was definitely shaking in her hand.

“It was an exchange,” I offered. “You lost your brother to the woods, so you figured the woods owed you something in return. Vern was the middleman.”

Montgomery took a deep breath, and the gun steadied. “Yes, I guess you could say that. We made good partners. He needed capital to get the business off the ground—literally, with the cherry-picker—and I knew where to find it. It was the perfect enterprise—free stock and minimal expenses. Fat profits. Our investor couldn’t be happier. And the Boreal sites were ideal. Vern could get in, cut, and get out with no one ever being the wiser.”

“As long as it wasn’t March or April,” I added.

“We were doing really well with just the lumber last fall,” she continued. “But then, as the holidays approached, we saw the real money-maker: Christmas trees. You wouldn’t believe how much money that generated.”

“Actually, I would,” I said. “My sister made a killing.”

My eyes dropped to the gun in her hand. Maybe that wasn’t the best word choice under the circumstances.

“And then it started snowing,” Montgomery went on. “The roads got so bad, we decided to just leave the picker here till spring. We covered it with the tarp, and the snow just piled on.”

Montgomery stopped to catch her breath. I was pretty sure she was tiring, because she clasped her other hand over the one holding the gun and raised it just a little higher.

And then the owl called again.

This time it was closer, and there was no mistaking the rising flute call. Despite having a gun pointed at me, I could actually feel a smile on my face. Here I’d finally gotten my Boreal, but I wasn’t sure I was going to live long enough to put it on my list.

My life list.

Which, unless I managed to disarm Montgomery pretty soon here, was going to be significantly shorter than I had hoped.

“Margaret,” Luce said, her voice cutting through the silence that had formed around us. “It’s so cold. Let’s all just go home.”

Montgomery laughed bitterly. “Don’t you think I want to? But you’re both a liability now, and I’m going to have to fix that.”

Another hoot of the owl filled the clearing.

But this time, it came from directly above us.

We all looked up automatically, but before I could lunge for Montgomery, she had the gun aimed at my heart.

“I hate owls!” Her voice rose. “They killed my brother. When I heard Rahr pounding in those spikes, all I could think of was that chain saw flying into my brother’s chest.”

“You heard Rahr spiking the trees?”

“Yes!” she shouted, suddenly raging. “He was spiking the trees! We were trying to get the damn picker moved out of here before anyone found it, and I heard the pounding echoing from over the rise, and I knew what it was!” The gun was vibrating in her hands. “I saw him! I couldn’t help it! He was making such a racket, he didn’t hear me come up to his back. There was a big branch. I picked it up and swung it as hard as I could. I slammed him into the tree!”

Montogmery was a big woman. With all her effort behind the blow, I could well imagine that it would have knocked Rahr out.

And then a blur of movement flew out of the night. Montgomery went down, hard, her gun flying off into the darkness.

I blinked. Stan already had Montgomery’s arms twisted behind her back and was pulling handcuffs out of a pocket.

I drew in a long breath. “What took you so long?” I asked him, for the second time that night.

Beside me, Luce squeaked and abruptly jerked away from me.

“Move a muscle, and she’s going to have a heart attack.”

Completely stunned, I turned. A man was holding Luce in a headlock, a hypodermic needle to her neck. Lit by the thin moonlight that filtered through the pines, he looked tanned and fit, but even in the dimness, his trademark silver toupee gave him away.